Gone In The Night movie review: Winona Ryder thriller loses its plot after promising start

Language: English

Director: Eli Horowitz

Cast: Winona Ryder, Dermot Mulroney, Brianne Tju, Owen Teague, John Gallagher Jr.

A woman drives to a rented log cabin for a weekend’s getaway in the wilds with her boyfriend. Once there, they are surprised to find a young couple already occupying the place. The place, it seems, has been double-booked. After a mild exchange and with no network coverage in the secluded area, the couples agree to share the accommodation for the night. The next morning, the woman wakes up to find the cabin is deserted. She ventures into the nearby woods in search of her boyfriend, right into an awaiting mystery.

Winona Ryder’s first film in nearly four years promises maximum thrills with its build-up within the first 10 minutes, leaving room for interesting options to carry forward the suspense drama. Director Eli Horowitz and his co-writer Matthew Derby choose to go ahead with a mishmash of ideas, turning what starts off as a gripping cabin-in-the-woods mystery into an underwhelming drama about a missing person before wholly losing the plot by adding a twist of medical thriller in the climax. Worse, the plot is centred on a quandary over mid-life crisis, too amateurishly imagined and executed to leave an impact.

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It is up to comeback star Ryder to try and salvage the show with her act as the protagonist Kath, along with the film’s other top-billed name Dermot Mulroney, who lights up the screenplay looking dapper as ever. The two leads manage only thus far, struggling with roles that don’t entirely invest in their capabilities as actors. Despite its billing as a mystery thriller, the screenplay does try accommodating the odd moment of chemistry between the two. The duo is alright, holding together a narrative that threatens to fall apart every once in a while.

Ryder’s Kath is a university professor who is out searching her lost boyfriend, the much younger Max (John Gallagher Jr.), in most of the film. Her plan of action would seem rather arbitrary, for instead of heading to the cops she decides to track down Greta (Brianne Tju), the other woman who was there at the cabin that night, on her own. Kath is convinced that tracing Greta would help her find Max. She is driven by the claim of Greta’s boyfriend Al (Owen Teague) that Max had disappeared with her. As the narrative follows Kath’s quest to uncover the mystery of Max’s disappearance, Mulroney as the rich and stylish Nicholas Barlow walks into her life. He becomes an ally and she is drawn closer to him. Without giving away spoilers, the Max-Kath and the Kath-Barlow relationships could have been turned into one engrossing triangle, especially because the trio ends up as the three significant aspects of the suspense plot.

If the story starts losing momentum no sooner that the film gets going, the reason becomes obvious soon enough. Director Horowitz and his screenwriter associate Derby deliberately try to complicate the drama in a bid to raise the mystery quotient, by mixing up the timeline and unfolding the suspense through random use of flashbacks. The strategy to introduce such backstories every time the script needs to explain a twist or a course of action could have been interesting. It is not, because the screenwriters fail to be cohesive while playing with the timeline. The ambitious attempt to tease the audience falls flat and the storytelling becomes chaotic, which in turn is a reason why even a limited runtime of 90 minutes appears stretched.

Director Horowitz’s priority while setting up the film’s thriller quotient seems concentrated on doling out red herrings, never mind if the effort lacks conviction. The idea that there is a far more sinister agenda behind the disappearance of Max, who by every yardstick seems a regular guy, should have been used to give a slow-burn impact to the drama. Instead, as Kath and Barlow sit around in a car testing how they look in sunglasses, mulling over the whys and wherefores of life, you witness a good thriller effort going waste. Horowitz’s biggest drawback is he fails to give the film a specific mood. Lazily moving in time cycles, Gone In The Night starts disintegrating into a haphazard pile of incoherence, far from scaling the high that a suspense thriller need to garner its audience’s unequivocal attention. Horowitz’s technical team imparts mixed support. While the film’s cinematography (David Bolen) is reminiscent of standard fare within the genre with its grim and understated tones, Arndt-Wulf Peemoller’s editing appears sluggish for a mainstream thriller. An ordinary background score (David Baldwin) doesn’t do much to augment the drama.

While Ryder’s post-Stranger Things form and Mulroney’s rugged presence give the film a starry boost, valuable support acts also come from Brianne Tju and John Gallagher Jr. Tju, especially, comes up with a spirited act as Greta even as the narrative sinks into a mire of confusion. The film’s lack of effective writing ends up a drawback for every actor in the cast.

Gone In The Night tries to be different from the pack as a thriller, which is probably the best thing that can be said about the film. It is the sort of film that fascinates you at first, but the effect starts to fade once you string together all that happened. You realise there was hardly much of a thriller worth getting hooked to, over the film’s runtime of around 90 minutes. There is a discomforting seed of an idea in the story somewhere, but it fails to have that impact owing to shoddy filmmaking. The film is meant to work as a jigsaw puzzle, only the makers seem to have goofed up while sourcing the right pieces to set up the puzzle in the first place.

Rating: * * (two stars out of five)

(Gone In The Night is available on BookMyShow Stream from 18 November 2022)

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.

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